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It is a pleasure to be invited to revisit Dante's Purgatorio, which I first read half a century ago and indeed, learned Italian by reading the Divine Comedy with the aid of John Sinclair's (1971) translation in three volumes - Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. David Black's interest likewise goes back many years, during which, as an analyst, he has found the Purgatorio the canticle which corresponds best to his experience of psychoanalysis, peopled by characters most like ourselves; and his aim in this new edition is to bring out the psychological features of Dante's narrative.
Dante's imaginary setting for this inner-world story is the purgatorial mountain, the reversed landscape of the wound made by Satan's fall to the centre of the earth. Its successive terraces are traced by the penitent in a constantly moving search for psychic metamorphosis from the earthly condition of pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust. Here, says Black, is a picture of the inner world in which the pilgrim (like the analysand) is in a hopeful state of continual striving for spiritual education, in the context of ‘the weather of psychic change’ (p. 439) (by contrast with Inferno's desert moonscape). Each terrace offers vivid vignettes of people in the form of ‘shades’: an allegorical mode in which (as Dante said himself) they represent ‘thoughts’ or psychic quandaries and directions - states of mind whose useful attributes, on an Aristotelian model, need to be distinguished from their excessive and distorted modes. Black emphasizes that for Dante, these ‘sins’ are ‘complex matters of motivation’ (p. 418). They are graded in their virulence and once sorted and sifted, they are brushed by a cherub from the penitent's brow. Access is then permitted to the next terrace of the ascent, en route for the Earthly Paradise, gateway to the mystical domain where they will no longer see through a glass darkly but will know themselves as they are known to God - that is, truthfully. It is